It's probably not a representative poll. It may be that older folk have less time for forums, or are better disciplined at not spending all their time on forums :-), or are less likely to bother with polls, etc. Who knows. What we can say for sure, though, is there is no reason to believe the poll is representative :-)

The first computer I programmed was a GE mainframe on the GEISD network. I don't remember the particular model and I never got closer to it than the acoustic coupler on our school's Friden Flexowriter.

I also learned on ADP (Automated Data Processing as opposed to EDP Electronic Data Processing) equipment. My high school had an IBM 402 Accounting Machine, 082 Sorter, 087 Collator, and 029 Keypunch (I'm sure on the 402, the other model numbers I may be off on). For the youngsters here (which probably include just about everybody) you program most of these machines by plugging what look like big (1/4") headphone jacks on either end of a single wire into a big board with a bunch of holes. If you want to add up the first six columns of a deck of punched cards, you essentially plugged six of these from the input holes to the accumulator holes and then six more (or seven, you had to account for overflow yourself) from the accumulator holes to the output holes.

My last year of high school, I got to work on the school system's IBM 1401 which was a real computer with a whole freaking kilobyte of memory to work with. If your program was bigger than 1KB, you had to write it so that it would swap in and out in 1KB chunks. You programmed it in Autocoder which was a very small step up from assembler language.

In college I learned Fortran, COBOL, and ALGOL on a Burroughs mainframe. I also learned IBM 360 Assembler which ran on the Burroughs via an IBM 360 emulator. That and IBM 360 machine language so you could read a core dump (essentially a hundred plus page blue screen of death).

First of all, big thanks Dave for taking the time to write that!

This just totally blows my mind:

"My high school had an IBM 402 Accounting Machine, 082 Sorter, 087 Collator, and 029 Keypunch (I'm sure on the 402, the other model numbers I may be off on)."

That there were computers in hIgh schools at the time in USA. Totally and utterly amazing. I guess that explains quite a bit about why USA became so dominant in computing. When I was in high school in late 80's/early 90's we were using about 8 year old Nokias...

I can't say that it was that prevalent. The county where I went to school spent more than the average on their school system. In the late 60s each of the three high schools had a set of punch card equipment and one paper tape terminal with one account on the GE time sharing service. The school system had one IBM 1401 which they used for scheduling, grades, and such. They got the 1401 as a hand-me-down when they county government bought an IBM 360.

Then, after I got hooked on programming, I tried to find a college where I could major in it. In 1969, there was one in all of the US - Stanford University. Everywhere else Computer Science was strictly an Electrical Engineering offshoot. After Stanford rejected me, I ended up majoring in business and taking computer courses on the side.

I'm from the 70's

Amen.

I'm only 21 and still my first comp was a ~10 mhz Macintosh Classic which I used quite a lot

It both suprises and makes me happy to see that about 10% of users in relatively technical forum are under 18. Good for Maemo in the long run, I think.

Hahaha.

If any of my friends know I stare at maemo.org sites for hours on end, they'd throw me into the "other" crowd (except one friend, who's actually heading a new linux distro. ).

I've been 14 for 15 days as of this post.

Got my first NIT (N800) when I just turned 13, and moved up to a N900 with all my savings.

I don't see how much further I can be from mainstream at this point...

Well. Just to show that not all kids go for iPods!

(And yes, I am actually doing some programming.)

From the 90s